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[troejgaard]

For general stuff about smart rules, see Automation > Smart Rules and Batch Processing in the manual. For more detailed descriptions of individual components, see Appendix > Smart Rule Events and Actions. Item scanning (Scan Name & Scan Text) is covered on p. 252 in the most recent PDF version. The File action is listed on p. 253.

I think Regular Expressions/regEx itself is outside the scope of the manual and only mentioned briefly. It is a feature with a long history in computing, widely used across all manner of software. Chrillek has written an introduction here:

What you always wanted to know about Regular Expressions

If you have used the search function of word processors or other programs, you might have stumbled on “wild-card” characters like * and ?, indicating any character and exactly one character. So, you might have used ???-??? ???? to search for US phone numbers. Which kind of works: This pattern will match a phone number like 555-123 4567. But it will also match entirely different strings, like ABC-xyz 1234. REs come to the rescue, since they allow a very detailed specification of the pattern you …

I have found CotEditor a big help in learning regEx. It has syntax highlighting helping you read and understand the patterns (I think BBEdit does the same.) It also highlights different capture groups in your text in different colors, so you get instant feedback. And it has a handly little cheat sheet.